Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Lisprolog

As someone has observed on comp.lang.prolog, there's a strange tendency among Lisp enthusiasts (some of whom I profoundly respect) to enthusiastically depreciate Prolog. Symptomatic for this imperialistic approach are the lots of toy Prolog interpreters written in Lisp you can find in the Internet (just try google).

For a long time, poor Prolog guys didn't have a good answer. However, this annoying situation has changed, thanks to Marcus Triska. Let me present, ladies and gentlemen, Lisprolog, the toy Lisp interpreter written in Prolog! It's very small (~200 lines of code), very clean and very neat. Maybe the language in it is a bit underimplemented, but that seems to be a part of the joke (a really complete implementation wouldn't be a good revenge for all that toy interpreters).

Personally, I find Lisprolog absolutely cute. I like very much both Lisp and Prolog, and implementing some of the missing features seems like a good exercise, allowing to learn something about Lisp and not forget Prolog, at the same time (I am reading Essentials of Programming Languages by Friedman, Wand & Haynes at the moment).

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Moving from wordpress to blogger

I have been maintaining my Polish blog on Wordpress.com server for more than half a year and become quite fed up of it. Paid upgrades, no access to the source of the style-sheet, and, last but not least, problems with logging in under firefox helped me a lot making my decision.

There's quite a lot written about moving your blog archive from blogger to wordpress. I, however, wanted to do just the opposite, which this turned to be a bit less trivial: Blogger is still beta and doesn't have any of the import/export facilities wordpress can be proud of.

Fortunately, I found a very nice python script which allowed me to make the move without any excessive pain: wordpress2blogger. Many thanks to the author!